Utilisant un cadre théorique hybride, mêlant travaux de géographie, notamment culturelle, et approche littéraire et stylistique, ce travail de thèse interroge les diverses spatialités mccanniennes et leur écriture, mais aussi les implications éthiques et esthétiques de cette articulation. Il étudie la manière dont la représentation de ces spatialités pousse l’écriture à chercher son équilibre, alors qu’elle s’inscrit dans des espaces diégétiques et narratifs caractérisés par l’entre-deux et l’hybridité. Ces deux notions sont placées au cœur d’un corpus mu par un élan irréductible et kaléidoscopique, définissable comme une quête d’équilibre et dont éthique et esthétique constituent les facettes les plus essentielles.Sont donc observées les formes et modalités des spatialités mccanniennes, la relation que les personnages entretiennent avec elles, ainsi que leur inscription dans un contexte contemporain. L’écriture de l’entre-deux et de l’hybridité, sources potentielles d’équilibre comme de déséquilibre, est également analysée. On voit enfin comment ces états intermédiaires sont propices à un élan impliquant la création de lignes dynamiques constituant un mouvement vers l’Autre. Cet élan interroge bien souvent la relation avec l’Art et avec l’Autre, ainsi que l’équilibre parfois problématique entre esthétique et éthique. Les possibles contradictions entre ces deux derniers pôles sont examinées, de même que le potentiel créatif, voire démocratique des échanges permis par leur dialogue. / This thesis uses a hybrid theoretical approach mixing cultural geography as well as literature and stylistics in order to study the various spatialities that can be found in Colum McCann’s fictional work. It focuses on the writing of space, place and landscape, as well as on its ethical and aesthetical aspects. It analyses the way representing these spatialities forces the texts to try and find some sense of balance while the realities they describe and the world they were written in are characterised by in-betweenness and hybridity. These notions are at the core of this corpus, which is defined by an impetus that is both irrepressible and kaleidoscopic and that can be defined as a quest for balance in which ethics and aesthetics play a most essential role.The forms those spatialities can take, the bond the characters have created or create with them as well as the way they are inscribed in the contemporary world are analysed. This study also examines the writing of in-betweenness and hybridity, which can be factors of both balance and imbalance. This intermediarity encourages the development of an impulse which means creating dynamic trajectories towards the Other. This impetus interrogates relationships to Art and Otherness, as well as the (im)balance between aesthetics and ethics. It is therefore particularly relevant to scrutinize the latent contradictions between these two poles but also the creative, sometimes even democratic potential of their interactions.

Ireland is not a country unfamiliar with trauma. It is an island widely known for its history with Vikings, famine, and as a colony of the English empire. Inevitably, then, these traumas surface in the literature from the nation. Much of the literature that was produced, especially after the decline in the Irish language after the Great Famine of the 1840s, focused on national identity. In the nineteenth century, there was a growing movement for Irish cultural identity, illustrated by authors John Millington Synge and William Butler Yeats; this movement was identified as the Gaelic Revival. Another movement in literature began in the nineteenth century and it reflected the social and political anxieties of the Anglo-Irish middle class in Ireland. This movement is the beginning of the Gothic genre in Irish literature. Dominated by authors such as Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, Gothic novels used aspects of the sublime and the uncanny to express the fears and apprehensions that existed in Anglo-Irish identity in the nineteenth century. My goal in writing this thesis is to examine Gothic aspects of contemporary Irish fiction in order to address the anxieties of Irish identity after the Irish War of Independence that began in 1919 and the resulting division of Ireland into two countries. I will be examining Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy, Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark, and Anna Burns' No Bones in order to evaluate their use of children amidst the trouble surrounding the formation of identity, both personal and national, in Northern Ireland. All three novels use gothic elements in order to produce an atmosphere of the uncanny (Freud); this effect is used to enlighten the theme of arrested development in national identity through the children protagonists, who are inescapably haunted by Ireland's repressed traumatic history.; Specifically, I will be focusing on the use of ghosts, violence, and hauntings to illuminate the social anxieties felt by Northern Ireland after the Irish War of Independence.